Primary Navigation

Kinect SDK Block for Cinder and other Kinect Experiments

Description

We've not hosted many Kinect for Windows SDK C++ related projects, so when this one came via an email suggestion, I thought it great for the Gallery. Plus Stephen is doing some very cool stuff in his Kinect Experiments...

Kinect Experiments & Kinect SDK Block for Cinder

I've been afforded the opportunity at Fashionbuddha to do some research with my new Kinect SDK block. My main goal right now is merge depth and color data in interesting ways to pull the user into warped computer land. For some time now, I've also been wanting to combine Kinect with CinderISO to make blob people. The videos here are all points along the way to something better, I'm feeling, but worth sharing all the same. These all reflect real time, interactive performance.

The last thing the world needs is another way to get a Kinect working with a PC. However, those who've done it have generally found any path they've chosen to be quite challenging, as it's essentially been a hack. Personally, I've also found issues with these libraries ranging from nasty memory leaks and crashes to under or unsupported basic features. Microsoft recently released an official SDK with drivers for the device. The drivers work like a dream without any fuss.

A huge bonus in using the official SDK is that it can skeletonize a user without a calibration pose. That is, it can figure out where all the joints in your body are without any work. Other libraries require to stand in a specific stance for a few seconds, rendering the feature essentially useless. Incorporating the block into Cinder eliminates this problem.

After a couple days of work, the Kinect SDK block beta is online. The result so far is a block which is fast, reliable, and dead simple to implement. It acquires skeletons almost instantly without calibration. Memory management is clean and the block even comes with audio input support.